Douglas Todd: Is Vancouver ready for full gender equality?

Douglas Todd

Updated: February 25, 2018

“We routinely still say, ‘There’s nothing like a mother. You can’t replace the mother.’ But what does that say about single fathers? About gay couples?," asks Anne-Marie Slaughter, who will speak in Vancouver on Wednesday evening. Robin Resch / PNG

A high-powered American policy analyst is coming to Vancouver on Wednesday with messages destined to challenge the status quo on gender equality.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, who wrote a famous Atlantic Magazine essay, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” believes many men and women, including feminists, are stuck in out-dated understandings of motherhood, fatherhood and how gender can play out in education, nursing and the trades.

“We routinely still say, ‘There’s nothing like a mother. You can’t replace the mother.’ But what does that say about single fathers? About gay couples? It’s B.S. The idea a man can’t parent a child, while raising children differently, is just crazy,” Slaughter said in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C.

The former director of policy planning for former U.S. president Barack Obama said society needs to push back against those who act as if males can’t be good caregivers; in much the same way people once denounced as “dinosaurs” those who believed that “bread-winning is a man’s job.”

“Oh my god, that is far-sighted. That is visionary. It’s an essential foundation for a 21st-century economy. Without it, you are knocking one member of a couple, whether man or woman, out of the workforce,” Slaughter said.

“Now that everybody needs to work for money, somebody has to do the care,” she said. “If you want all your talent in the workforce, and if you want your workforce to reproduce, then you better be providing for care.”

Slaughter believes Nordic countries, and Germany and France, have generally done better than the U.S. and Canada at supporting gender equity. Most have provided universal daycare and, in many cases, mandated that fathers, not just mothers, take parental leave to maximize the family’s taxpayer-supported benefits.

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Her Wednesday talk in Vancouver, sponsored by Simon Fraser University as part of a workplace series running to March 7, will include her views on how vibrant cities should avoid, as much as possible, smashing down old structures to make way for new ones.

“The difference between a genuine developed economy and a developing economy is history remains visible in a developed economy. When I lived in Shanghai, the Chinese approach was tragic. It was, ‘Tear down everything and put up new glass structures.’”

Her views on demolitions will have special resonance in fast-growing Metro Vancouver, where heritage specialists are among those challenging the intense demand, from offshore and domestically, for new condo towers and commercial buildings, much of them featuring glass.

âI want to tell you that, as the mother of two sons, boy, do I wish there were more men in elementary school teaching. Itâs ridiculous,â says Slaughter.Jenelle Schneider /
Vancouver Sun

“When I return to New York, or think of London and Toronto, I think the sign of a really developed economy is seeing layers and layers of time, where you continually renew but do not discard your past,” she said. “Maintaining a visible record of the passage of time is also a perpetual source of work: It’s a way of having a vibrant economy that does not depend on destruction.”

With her emphasis on renewing cities and the marketplace, Slaughter said introducing more robotics into workplaces should help women move into the trades and even the military; careers they have so far almost entirely shunned out of the dubious belief they require extreme levels of physical strength.

In addition to wanting to see far more women go into the trades, Slaughter would like more men, many of whom are being laid off from factory jobs, to enter the so-called caring professions, including education and health care, which now tend to be dominated by women.

“I want to tell you that, as the mother of two sons, boy, do I wish there were more men in elementary school teaching. It’s ridiculous.”

Just as female students complain about not having enough female university professors as role models, Slaughter said there is a serious deficit for boys who end up being taught almost exclusively by women for the first eight to 10 years of their school lives.

Despite decades of feminism, Slaughter believes many men and women, including so-called progressives, have a long way to go to truly embrace gender equality and more creative approaches to household roles.

“(Woman) can earn a lot of money and still be plenty feminine,” she laughed. “And (men) should be able to be the lead parent, and be very competent in the house, and still be plenty masculine.”

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